In association with XO ProjectsA Night of Works in ProgressNovember 17, 2018

Old American Can Factory232 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY 11215$10 (proceeds go directly to the artists)*Available online (https://bpt.me/3846770) or at the door

Бабушка | BAb(oo)shka is an interdisciplinary performance rooted in the liberating potential of queer translation. Three non-Russian-speaking performers live-translate a series of impassioned anecdotes told by my Soviet Jewish grandmother. Their retellings emerge as an imperfect patchwork of interpretation incorporating dance and physical theater. Ultimately, BAb(oo)shka asks: what grows out of the fraught space of miscommunication?

2-D limbs—all colors, sizes, pattern—hang together on a wall upstage, like a clothes rack full of body parts. Some are photographs of limbs or photographs of objects; others are sketches, abstractions, symbols. An aria version of “Someone to Love” (Queen) sings out. A beacon of high drama, the emotional tenor of an identity in flux, the song continues as the scene unfolds.

A naked performer walks onstage and begin to get dressed, unconcerned with the music, choosing their body coverings from the 2-D options on the back wall. They try on different body parts, strapping a scribbled rib cage and photo-realistic thigh to their bodies to frame their real genitals. As they try on the paper parts, they move downstage to check themselves out, treating the audience like a mirror. How does this collage of body parts fit them? As if they were learning to manipulate a puppet, the performer brings the 2-D body-part-collages to life. They improv with the physics of their anatomy and the characters their physical limits create. The performer is as informal and intimate as if they were in their own bedrooms, while the dramatic aria rings out. They try on different identities like outfits, even putting on body parts that don’t fit their own: mismatched skin colors, different sized bellies, genitals not like their own. They go back to the exposed closet and try again. Eventually, the performer finds their best outfit, a complete set of photographs from their own body with a mask of their own face. They move downstage where they triumphantly sink into the embodiment of their 2-D personhood. They walk off stage, exploring the materiality of their mediated body.

August 31-Sept 2: Cocoon Theatre (Poughkeepsie, NY) as a part of the No Theme Festival

Daughters of the Moon: A Puppetry Story retells Italo Calvino’s 1968 short story, an ecofeminist folktale centered around a dying Moon and its struggle to survive in a consumption-obsessed world not unlike our own. For this live performance version, multimedia puppets set the scene for the story as told by gender neutral narrator Qfwfq. Dance theater and live violin create a dreamy landscape for this nostalgic glimpse into 60s capitalist critique, posing the question: how can we learn from Calvino to infuse storytelling into political commentary today?

Cruisical: A Lesbian Musical is an anachronistic musical comedy bringing together six queer cis women whose lives we wish had intersected over the last 150 years. Luckily, these six women—Mercedes de Acosta, Moms Mabley, Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, and Esther Eng—find themselves magically transported to the year 2018, where they have landed on an all-inclusive lesbian cruise. Hearts and lives become entangled over piña coladas by the pool, as these women deal with petty interpersonal disputes and larger misunderstandings of 21st-century queerness. With a libretto pulling from their real-life correspondences and diaries, and a campy musical theater soundtrack informed by their respective eras, these women fall in love—and overboard—in this farcical romp. Inspired by queer theater companies Split Britches and The Five Lesbian Brothers, our collaborative team of queer women pays earnest homage to our foremothers, who lived and loved out loud at great personal risk. In Cruisical, we give them the tropical lesbian vacation they deserved.

I am so excited to go to Barnarts to work on a new performance, Бабишка | BAb(oo)shka, an interdisciplinary performance that begins with my grandmother (babushka) and another elderly charismatic Jew from the Soviet Union telling a true story—chosen by them—in Russian onstage. Their humorous anecdotes about Jewish oppression are then contemporaneously translated into English (by me), into music (by a Yiddish Klezmer band), and into a puppet melodrama (by a group of physical theater performers). These retellings weave together to create a meta-conversation on the act of translation and historicization, exposing the realities of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and how those experiences transform across generations and migrations.

Daughters of the Moon: A Puppetry Story retells Italo Calvino’s 1968 short story, an ecofeminist folktale centered around a dying Moon and its struggle to survive in a consumption-obsessed world not unlike our own. For this live performance version, multimedia puppets set the scene for the story as told by gender neutral narrator Qfwfq. Dance theater and live violin create a dreamy landscape for this nostalgic glimpse into 60s capitalist critique, posing the question: how can we learn from Calvino to infuse storytelling into political commentary today?